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Flash Movie Review: Black Bag
IN TERMS OF TRUST, I WAS raised with a solid foundation that enabled me to wholeheartedly have a strong bond of trust with my friends and family members. Unfortunately, that strong bond got dented early on. I was in the early grades of elementary school and had a few friends come over after school one day. We played a board game that all of us were into at the time; the playing lasted a little over an hour. Everyone put their game pieces and cards into the game box, and I put the lid on and put it back on the shelf. The next time I played the game, I noticed one of the game pieces was missing. I took out all the containers and cardboard liners from the box, but there was no sign of the piece. The only thing I could think of was one of my friends kept their game piece. I was hurt and upset. What exacerbated my sad feelings was another incident that hammered a blow to my trust, a few weeks after discovering the missing piece. I went bowling with a few of my relatives. For a reason I cannot figure it out, I took off my new and very first wristwatch and placed it on the scoring table. At the end of the game, we turned in our rented bowling shoes and headed out the door. We were four blocks away when I realized I left my watch behind. I explained what happened to my relatives and ran back to the bowling alley, to look for my watch. Absolutely no sign of it and no one had turned it into the lost and found; I was devastated. HAVING THOSE TWO INCIDENTS TAKING PLACE so early in my life, colored my feelings about trusting people. To drive the point home, one of my earliest love relationships shattered my belief system of trust. We had been dating for six months when an opportunity came up for a free trip to Mexico; they were a travel agent, so got these deals from time to time. We flew down to the resort that was being promoted and had planned to stay five days. When we arrived at the resort’s hotel, I felt the assistant manager was paying extra attention to us, but assumed it was because we were listed as travel agents in their records. The assistant manager made another appearance during breakfast, and I started to sense there was an ulterior motive. The two of us finished eating and went back to the room to change to sit by the pool. It was not until lunchtime that we returned to our room. I went to take a shower first and while in the bathroom, I thought I heard a knock at the door. For some reason, I decided to leave the shower water running after I stepped out and dried off. When I came out of the bathroom, there was my partner and the assistant manager making out on top of our bed. I was furious; so angry, that the intruder ran out of the room. I then turned to my partner and yelled some tough words for them before packing up and making my way back to the airport. I never spoke to them again. Because of my issues with trust, I totally understood the dilemma the husband had in this dramatic spy thriller romance. WHEN MASTER SPY GEORGE WOODHOUSE, PLAYED by Michael Fassbender (Next Goal Wins, X-Men franchise), was assigned a list of possible traitors to the agency, he notices one of the names on the list was his wife. How can he protect his country and wife at the same time? With Gustaf Skarsgard (I’ll Be Your Mirror, Vikings-TV) as Phillip Meacham, Cate Blanchett (Borderlands, Don’t Look Up) as Kathryn St. Jean, Tom Burke (The Souvenir, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga) as Freddie Smalls, and Marisa Abela (Rogue Agent, Back to Black) as Clarissa Dubose; this film started out slow for me. However, as the scenes unfolded and I had a grasp of the characters, I started to enjoy what was taking place. The acting was tight and efficient with Michael and Cate as standouts for me. Directed by Steven Soderbergh (Presence, Logan Lucky), I thought the pacing was equally as taut and fast paced. I appreciated the action was more verbal without the blood and violence, though there was one scene that had it. The script could have offered more depth, but under the circumstances I could see where that would have slowed things down. This movie turned out to be an exciting and fun watch with its twists and turns.
3 stars
Flash Movie Review: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
GENUINELY, I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A curious person. I always felt one gets to really know someone from the journey they took to get to their present time. Their past, at least to me, reveals so much more than hearing them talk about their thoughts on current affairs or their favorite pastimes. Because of my interest, there have been times I wondered if I was annoying the person by asking them so many questions. I never wanted it to feel like an interrogation; I simply want to know who they really are behind the surface. I met a man who was his state’s spelling bee champion for several years in a row. He was accepted at some of the top schools in the country like MIT and Princeton. At his job, he oversaw a staff of 1,100 employees and was ranked in the top ten positions of his company. Listening to him, I assumed that he had to come from a stable family, who had the means to get him a good education that gave him all the opportunities he mentioned to me. I could not have been more wrong. It turned out he was from a broken home; his mother having been married and divorced a few times. At one point, things were so bad that he and his mom had to live in their car for several months because they had nowhere else to go. I was stunned. I HEARD SUCH A VARIETY OF back stories from individuals; some of them worthy of being immortalized in a movie. There was the owner of a popular restaurant in the city, who very few people knew he, as a young boy, was in a concentration camp. He chose the restaurant business because he never wanted anyone to experience the starvation he had during the war. There was the woman who was a single mother, raising two daughters, who never wanted her children to not have a roof over their heads, so she devoted most of her extra savings for the purchasing of apartment buildings. By the time her oldest daughter was out of college, she had nearly a dozen different properties that were all generating income. I do not want to come across like a braggart, but there have been people who found my journey to teaching fitness an interesting tale. Being overweight for most of my young life and flunking gym class twice in high school, I came up with an exercise and diet program I could follow without feeling I was missing something. During my weight loss, I ventured out to an aerobics class with a friend and fell in love with it. From there I started subbing classes, while working on getting certified. Afterwards, I wound up teaching at several locations and had a long career in the fitness industry. There is something about hearing a person’s back story that makes their life shine brighter in my mind. I never thought I needed to know the back story to the movie character Furiosa, but I was fascinated with it in this prequel to the film franchise. HAVING BEEN ABDUCTED FROM HER HOMELAND by a powerful warlord, a young girl learns how to take care of herself so that one day she can keep her promise of returning home. Her journey would be a perilous one. With Anya Taylor-Joy (The New Mutants, The Menu) as Furiosa, Chris Hemsworth (Extraction franchise, Men in Black: International) as Dementus, Tom Burke (The Souvenir, The Wonder) as Praetorian Jack, Alyla Browne (Three Thousand Years of Longing, The Secret Kingdom) as Young Furiosa and Lachy Hulme (Killer Elite, The Matrix Revolutions) as Immortan Joe; this action, science fiction adventure was all about the fight and chase scenes, and I will have to say they were spectacular. The intensity, the movements and the creativity blended to create some amazing scenes. On top of that, Anya was riveting in her role. Without much dialog, it was easy to understand what she felt and her reactions. I, however, thought the script was too long and did not have the fire that the previous movie had on display. For the most part, this picture was one action scene after another with a small amount of groundwork to set up the scenes. If a viewer does not care about the life of Furiosa, they might not have a strong interest in this movie, especially if not interested in seeing violence and blood.
3 stars
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